Transcendental Resistance - The New Americanists and Emerson's Challgenge (original) (raw)
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Representation, Emerson, and the New Americanists
Comparative American Studies, 2008
Representation and its politics have been key interests in the critical work of New Americanists. This article scrutinizes the theories of representation that underlie the writings of three influential critics associated more or less closely with the New Americanists – Carolyn Porter, John Carlos Rowe, and Donald E. Pease – through the lens of their contributions to Emerson criticism. After tracing their theoretical roots in various schools of Western Marxism, the article takes issue with the totalizing view of representation at which all three critics arrive one way or another. It then suggests an alternative view of representation contained in Emerson’s writings, which focuses on the dynamics that take place inside the act of representation. Such a dynamic concept re-conceptualizes the political in representation by focusing on the fissures between reception and expression, both individually and socially. This internal dynamic, the article claims, has become nearly opaque from New Americanist perspectives on representation.
American Transcendentalism doc 1
Despire the claims of some American linguists, the American language doesn't exist. So, from a theoretical point of view, American literature shouldn't exist too. But the dilemma, whether a separate literature can exist without a separate language and to what extent the state borders can determine to which literary tradition a writer belongs, is present all around the world. For example, Samuel Beckett was born an Irishman, sometimes wrote in English and sometimes in French, and later translated his works into English. So, we have to admit that the idea of national literature is a rather nebulous notion and that the American literature does exist as a set of influences, themes and literary solutions different from those in Europe. At the end of the 1920s even the European cultural elite started to view American writing as separate from English literature and in 1930 the Nobel Prize for literature went to an American writer for the first time. Paradoxically, American writers who lived in Europe during the same period played a great role in the recognition of American literary particularity. Through their creative works, writers like Henry James, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, changed European literary perceptions of American literature for ever. One of the first expressions of this new European view of American literature appeared in interview by Andre Gide. He claims that American literature is different, even bizarre when compared to the European. The question appears -what are the differences and what are main characteristics of American literature?
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Nature”: A Transcendentalist’s Call for Nationalistic Literature
2023
In the wake of the Revolutionary War American writers were eager to partake in the establishment of a national identity, one free of imposing governmental and religious institutions seeking conformity and acquiescence of the mind. The collective literary works of the American Renaissance – referred to by some as the “richest period” (Reynolds) in American literature - championed individualism, idealism, and the divinity of nature as the principal characteristics of the burgeoning country’s populace. Steadfast in his pursuit of establishing a distinctly American identity, Ralph Waldo Emerson requisitioned the need for nationalistic literature that represented principal characteristics defined by the fledgling nation. With the release of his renown essay “Nature” , Emerson emphasized the importance of a nationalistic literature, and fortified the foundational concepts of the transcendental movement that were carried within the extensive literary works of the American Renaissance.
Transcendental Quest for a Hero: Emerson, Thoreau, and Fuller
This work begins by briefly exploring the historical, cultural, and economic factors springing up from the rise of scientific and economic materialism in the crux of capitalism. It is argued that the bourgeois value system strangled the possibility of heroic action in the public arena and thereby eliminated the poet’s ability to find a heroic figure in nineteenth century America. The focus is then shifted to the Transcendentalist movement (Emerson, Thoreau and Fuller), who fear the loss of the hero as the loss of inspiration for mankind and the loss of subject matter for poets. The works and ideas of Emerson are interpreted as an attempt at inspiring individuals in the public to step forth into the spotlight of Western society in the hopes of counteracting the trends and forces in modernity that render the metropolitan citizen ineffectual and complacent. Thoreau’s experiments in Walden and civil disobedience are examined in the light of early efforts to find venues of political action in the private life of the everyday man as a possibility for heroism. Fuller is sketched as the prototype for modernized vates or prophet as poet/hero. It is argued that Fuller brings to life the dual role of hero and poet via the social activism she attempted in her use of the press in order to make the public aware of the ills in society as a means of mobilization and serving as an apocryphal propaganda. The extent to which each individual succeeded and/or failed is also to be described.
European Journal of American Culture, 2009
This article begins with a brief consideration of the resurgence of religious rhetoric as currently used by George W. Bush. It discusses this alongside what Harold Bloom terms an 'authentic American religion' in his article, 'Reflections in the Evening Land' (December 17, 2005). Bloom looks retrospectively at Emersonian self-reliance as the 'authentic American religion' and he urges contemporary American readers to remember this as a truly American religion. An exploration of this apparent correlation between self-reliance and an authentic American religion uncovers the somewhat unnoticed influence of William Blake's poetry on Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays. A close analysis of Emerson's early reading of Blake beside a consideration of Blake's 'London' (1794), 'The Clod and the Pebble' (1794) and Emerson's 'Self-Reliance' (1841) and 'Society and Solitude' (1870) documents the development of Emersonian self-reliance into a more assured term. This is accounted for by Emerson's growing interest and immersion in the poetry of this English poet, William Blake. The article concludes, contentiously, with the declaration that it is only through this transatlantic study of Blake's and Emerson's writing that Bloom's 'authentic American religion' can really be understood. Self-reliance in contemporary America In 2005, Harold Bloom published an article in The Guardian entitled 'Reflections in the Evening Land'. The article was written in response to the politics of the Christian Right in the United States, and in particular to George W. Bush's version of Christianity that seemed to be sweeping across the States at the time. As Bush and the Christian Right latterly preach a new gospel, which differs from European Christianity, Bloom notes that it is 'the religiosity of the country [the United States], which truly divides us into two nations' (Bloom 2005: 4), namely the Christian Right and those who study them, the intellectual Left. As the United States faces a postbellum split, Bloom heralds Whitman as a prophet and preacher of nineteenth-century America's 'religion' of self-reliance (referring to Whitman as a 'more positive Emersonian') and urges the reader to remember this as 'the authentic 75
American Transcendentalism: A Liberty Lesson and Individual Reforms
RESUME :Cet article examine la contribution des Transcendentalistes dans la création d"un individualisme américain et des réformes sociales et culturelles en vue de réorienter les engagements politiques. En tant que réformateurs sociaux, les Transcendantalistes se sont démarqués du conformisme et des normes culturelles standards en prônant le libéralisme et des réformes sociales, tout comme l"auto-développement individuel. Cet apportréformateur et transformatif de l"après-guerre vient en appoint d"une Amérique indépendante résolument tournée vers l"avenir avec des villes industrialisées et une société urbaine culturellement et religieusement pluraliste. A travers des réformes sociales et politiques, les Transcendentalistes incarnèrent une Amérique nouvelle basée sur la certitude morale, le génie individuel et l"autonomie en actions et aux croyances collectives.
Educational Philosophy and Theory
b Education, stockholms universitet, stockholm, sweden 'Where do we find ourselves?' (Emerson, 1983, p. 27) is the question which opens Ralph Waldo Emerson's classic essay 'Experience'. In admiration of Emerson, Nietzsche warns, addressing his reader, that answering this question may lead into 'countless paths and bridges and demi-gods which would bear you through this stream; but only at the cost of yourself' (1997, p. 129). Instead Nietzsche suggests a path into the unknown. The attention to Bildung and self-cultivation in this special issue is an attempt to explore Nietzsche's rephrasing of Emerson's question, 'But how can we find ourselves again?' (1997, p. 129). The contributors to this issue, in their writing and thinking, stay with this question, rather than giving it a hasty answer. Such a posture, for Emerson, characterizes democratic life. Emerson has long been admired as a writer and important figure of American culture and literature. His works have inspired philosophers such as Nietzsche, John Dewey, George Santayana and others, but until recently his writing thrived mostly on the peripheries of the discussions in professional philosophy. In philosophy of education, his work has shared this fate. Emerson is widely admired but not often thoroughly and explicitly discussed. 1 Still, as Heikki Kovalainen has argued: 'Emerson might be understood as the nexus author par excellence of […] various line of American Bildung. Not only was his philosophy of Bildung decisively shaped by Europeans and Americans, it also exerted subsequent influence on them, particularly Friedrich Nietzsche and the three classical American pragmatists, Peirce, James, and Dewey' (Kovalainen, 2012, p. 183). Nietzsche's prominent text on education, 'Schopenhauer as Educator' , can be seen as the work which is most indebted to Emerson. There, he pronounces the idea of education as a matter of finding oneself and finding oneself again; a form of education in which educators or teachers are thought of as cultivators, where cultivation is a liberation from set paths and bridges and other idolatrous gods that determine the goal of the journey (Nietzsche, 1997, p. 130). In this conception of education resound Emerson's words: 'Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul' (1971, p. 80). Education, for Emerson, is a form of cultivation of the self. But this is not all. If Emersonian education begins with questions like 'Where do we find ourselves?' then education as self-cultivation is not only a matter of Bildung as an enculturation in the hands of others. It also makes us 'responsible for our own self-cultivation' (Bates, 2012, p. 28). The tension between our dependency on others for provocation and education and our own improvisations in cultivating ourselves is a recurrent theme in this special issue. It is present in questions of inheritance and novelty, of language and our application of words, in positioning ourselves as scholars, in orienting ourselves as private and public beings between the political and the personal. These tensions are not intellectual riddles, but, as is demonstrated in this issue, experiences of life, in life. It has been largely due to the commendable work of Stanley Cavell and his extensive endeavors to reclaim for Emerson the status of a philosopher to be taken seriously as
Metonymies of Mind: Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, and the Rhetoric of Liberal Education
Critics in both philosophy and literary studies have rightly emphasized a “poetics of transition” relating the thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson to that of William James. However, less attention has been given to the ways that Emerson’s philosophy of rhetoric correlates with James’s rhetorical perspectives on psychology and philosophy. Fundamentally rhetorical interests in the contiguous circumstances and contingent reception of thinking link James to Emerson beyond matters of poetics and style. This essay correlates Emerson’s understanding of a rhetoric of metonymy as the basis of thinking with the principle of contiguity crucial to James’s philosophy of mind. This relation between rhetoric and philosophy reiterates a rhetoric of mind that both Emerson and James associate with the older liberal education of the college just at the point that it disappears into the professional, specialized disciplines of the emerging university in late nineteenth-century America.